Storyline

New York working girl Susan Applegate is desperate to go home to Iowa but does not have the railway fare so she disguises herself as a child to ride half fare. Enroute she meets Philip Kirby, an Army major teaching at a military school.Written by
Jack McKillop <jem3@donuts0.bellcore.com>

Technical Specs

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Did You Know?

Trivia

As a neophyte director, Billy Wilder heavily relied on editor Doane Harrison for guidance. Harrison had edited Hold Back the Dawn (1941), which Charles Brackett and Wilder had written. Unusually for an editor, Harrison was on the set for filming as well as working in the cutting room. Wilder later said, "I worked with a very good cutter, Doane Harrison, from whom I learned a great deal. He was much more of a help to me than the cameraman. When I became a director from a writer my technical knowledge was very meagre." Harrison taught him how to "cut in the camera," a form of spontaneous editing that results in a minimal amount of film being shot and eliminates the possibility of studio heads later adding footage the director deemed unnecessary. In later years, Wilder commented, "When I finish a film, there is nothing on the cutting room floor but chewing gum wrappers and tears." Wilder's and Harrison's unusually close and important collaboration continued for every subsequent film directed by Wilder through The Fortune Cookie (1966). See more »

Goofs

The cadet left the switchboard to get a radio, and returned with a battery portable valve radio. Although quite expensive to buy and to operate, there was a very large market for battery portable valve radios and they were very common throughout the valve era. Batteries were the only possible power supply, because valves with "heaters" used with AC mains power electricity appeared after the D.C. battery types. Texas Instruments in 1952 demonstrated their all-transistor AM radios, but their performance was well below that of equivalent battery tube models. In August 1953 a workable all-transistor radio was demonstrated at the Düsseldorf Radio Fair by the German firm Intermetall. If you had no knowledge of the existence of battery portable valve radios in 1942, you might mistakenly believe that the portable radio is a fake, because the portable transistor radio was not invented till 1952. See more »

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User Reviews

Billy Wilder scores an early winner with this wonderful film. The story, characters, and dialogue combine to make this a classic romantic comedy from the early 1940s, and the legendary writing combination of Wilder and Charles Bracket is as witty as ever. At a Chicago screening in June 2002, the audience was delighted by the comedy and laughed constantly -- the timelessness of this film is just one of its great qualities.

Billy Wilder was a genius, and this film is but one chapter of his saga...

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